And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in any numbers into
the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get even hundreds of
people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our government 
and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war against Gaza,
half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize ten thousand protesters. Only
once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand people
to the square  and then only to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak
Rabin.

The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference, fatigue, and a "loss
of the belief in the ability to change reality," as a Supreme Court justice
put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in order to get masses of
people to demonstrate for peace.

For Mir-Hossein Mousavi hundreds of thousands have demonstrated, and hundreds
of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That says something
about the people and about the regime.

Can anyone imagine a hundred thousand people gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir
Square to protest against the official election results? The police would open
fire before a thousand had assembled there.

Would even a thousand people be allowed to demonstrate in Amman against His
Majesty? The very idea is absurd.

Some years ago, the Saudi security forces in Mecca opened fire on unruly pilgrims.
In Saudi Arabia, there are never protests against election results  simply
because there are no elections.

In Iran, however, there are elections, and how! They are more frequent than
elections in the U.S., and Iranian presidents change more often than American
ones. Indeed, the very protests and riots show how seriously the citizens there
treat election results.

Of course, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we understand democracy.
There is a supreme guide who fixes the rules of the game. Religious bodies
rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt laws that contradict
religious law. And the laws of God are unchangeable  at most, their interpretation
can change.

All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. From the very beginning the
religious camp has been trying to turn Israel into a religious state, in which
religious law (called Halakha) would be above the civil law. Laws "revealed"
thousands of years ago and regarded as unchangeable would take precedence over
laws enacted by the democratically elected Knesset.

To understand Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties:
Shas. They, too, have a supreme guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything.
He appoints the party leadership, he selects the party’s Knesset candidates,
he directs the party faction how to vote on every single issue. There are no
elections in Shas. And in comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a model of moderation.

Elections differ from country to country. It is very difficult to compare
the fairness of elections in one country with those in another.

At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old Soviet Union. There
it was joked that a voter entered the ballot room, received a closed envelope
from an official, and was politely requested to put it into the ballot box.

"What, can’t I know who I am voting for?" the voter demanded.

The official was shocked. "Of course not! In the Soviet Union we have
secret elections!"

At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion of democracy,
the USA. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results were decided
by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are convinced
to this very day that the results were fraudulent.

In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is
passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair.

Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people
claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a
half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held
democratic elections in 2006, which former president Jimmy Carter described
as exemplary, but Israel, the U.S., and Europe refused to accept the results,
because they did not like them.

So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography.

Were the election results in Iran falsified? Practically none of us 
in Tel Aviv, Washington, or London  can know. We have no idea, because
none of us  and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies
 really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply
our common sense, based on the little information we have.

Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results
were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is
quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign,
every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it
is quite sure that the results are forged.

Some time ago, Germany’s excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast
an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from
the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering
people’s homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.

I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect:
in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor
and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the U.S., go to prestigious universities,
and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition,
revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North.

Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages
and small towns  which we call the "periphery"  identify
with the South and are alienated from the North.

In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas, and the other right-wing parties.
The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the
Right thus won a resounding victory.

It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to
assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won.

The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran
prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official
results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of
votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words:
it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries
 and there is no reason to believe that there were not  they probably
did not reach proportions that could sway the end result.

There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary
spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has
succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both
the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army
was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany.
Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to
power with its support.

In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street
confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open
fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When
they shoot, that is the end of the matter.

When Boris Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he
won. The Berlin Wall fell because one East German police officer refused at
the decisive moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when,
in the final test, the soldiers of the shah refused to shoot. That did not
happen this time. The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected
by the revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the
affair.

I am not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more.

I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches
to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who
ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the Holocaust  an
idiotic exercise in itself  only adds to Ahmadinejad’s image as a primitive
or cynical leader.

No doubt, he is a sworn enemy of the state of Israel or  as he prefers
to call it  the "Zionist regime." Even if he did not promise
to wipe it out himself, as erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief
that it would "disappear from the map," this does not set my mind
at rest.

It is an open question whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference
as far as we are concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce
nuclear weapons? Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance?
The answer is negative.

It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad would win, exacerbate
the hatred of the Western world against himself, and make reconciliation with
America more difficult.

All through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with admirable restraint.
American and Western public opinion, as well as the supporters of the Israeli
government, called upon him to raise his voice, identify with the protesters,
wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in
no uncertain terms. But except for minimal criticism, he did not do so, displaying
both wisdom and political courage.

Iran is what it is. The U.S. must negotiate with it, for its own sake and for
our sake, too. Only this way  if at all  is it possible to prevent
or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned to live
under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of a balance
of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an Iranian leadership
that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of course, it would
be good for us if  before reaching that point  we could achieve, with the
friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian people, thus removing
the main justification for Iran’s hostility toward Israel.

The revolt of the Northerners in Iran will remain, so it seems, a passing
episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run, beneath the surface.
But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory of the Iranian denier.

Author: Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 he has advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with the PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first Israeli ever to meet Yasser Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut. He served three terms in the Israeli Knesset and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc). Visit his Web site.
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